ISIS and the Curse of the Iraq War

An aerial view of the ancient ruins in Palmyra, taken soon after ISIS invaded the Syrian oasis, in May.Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY DIGITALGLOBE / GETTY

I’ve been reading up recently on the ancient history of Iraq and Syria, a region that is often referred to, not for nothing, as the cradle of civilization. Here is where rapid population growth, urbanization, the specialization of labor, manufacturing, written language, money, mathematics, and astronomy all originated.

Today, of course, parts of the region have fallen under the control of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, which, as part of its stated aim to create an Islamic caliphate, is destroying any traces of earlier religions and civilizations. (Evidently, in keeping with its Wahhabi roots, it regards them as antithetical to Islam, despite the fact that they existed thousands of years before the prophet Muhammad was born.) Earlier this year, after occupying Mosul, in northern Iraq, ISIS militants ransacked the city’s central museum, taking drills and sledgehammers to statues and relics from the empires of Akkadia and Assyria, some of which reportedly dated back to the start of the first millennium B.C.

More recently, ISIS forces have extended their campaign against human history to Palmyra, a city built around an oasis in central Syria. It dates to the start of the second millennium B.C., and was later ruled by the Seleucids, who came to power after Alexander the Great’s empire was divided. A week and a half ago, ISIS fighters beheaded Khaled Assad, an eighty-two-year-old scholar who for decades served as Palmyra’s director of antiquities, and as head of its museum. ISIS then suspended his body from a traffic light. So dedicated was Assad to his mission of preserving his city’s history that, according to a report in the Times, he had named a daughter after Queen Zenobia, who ruled Palmyra in the third century A.D.

Then, last week, ISIS forces blew up the Baalshamin Temple, a United Nations World Heritage Site that was first constructed in Palmyra in the second century B.C., and rebuilt in the first century A.D. “The systematic destruction of cultural symbols embodying Syrian cultural diversity reveals the true intent of such attacks, which is to deprive the Syrian people of its knowledge, its identity and history,” Irina Bokova, the director-general of UNESCO, the cultural and educational arm of the U.N., said in a statement responding to the destruction. “Such acts are war crimes and their perpetrators must be accountable for their actions.”

A commendable statement, indeed. But what prospect is there that ISIS’s murderous ranks, and their leaders, will be brought to justice—not just for destroying antiquities, of course, but also for rounding up and massacring people living in the territories they’ve occupied, inducing women into sex slavery, killing Western captives and posting the footage online, calling for terrorist attacks in the United States and other countries, and so on. Right now, the chance that ISIS’s leaders will be brought before the International Criminal Court, say, is slim to none.

Despite more than a year of air strikes by the United States and its allies, and despite some important battlefield successes by the Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga forces during that time, ISIS appears to be as strong as ever. Or, at least, that is what U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded, according to a report published a month ago by the Associated Press. And, this week, the Timesrevealed that the Pentagon is now investigating whether intelligence officials “skewed intelligence assessments about the United States-led campaign in Iraq against the Islamic State to provide a more optimistic account of progress.”

Obama Administration officials continue to claim that the policy of air strikes, combined with the deployment of several thousand U.S. soldiers to train Iraq’s army and the supplying of arms to the so-called “moderate rebels” in Syria, will eventually bear fruit. “I’m confident that we will succeed in defeating ISIL and that we have the right strategy,” Ashton Carter, the Defense Secretary, said last week. But Carter also conceded that “it’s going take some time.” Assuming so, that means the task of confronting ISIS, and deciding whether to escalate the level of U.S. involvement, will almost certainly fall on the next President.

And what will he or she do? Absent a horrific ISIS-inspired attack on U.S. soil, the likely answer is not much more than Obama is doing. Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, has publicly backed Obama’s strategy of seeking to “degrade” ISIS’s military capabilities over time. The Republican candidates for President are forever criticizing Obama for not doing enough to tackle ISIS, but when you examine the policy statements of the leading contenders you find few concrete proposals, and a marked reluctance to commit U.S. troops.

Jeb Bush, in a typically bold move, has said that he would defer to the advice of U.S. military commanders. Donald Trump, seemingly oblivious to the fact that most of Iraq’s oil fields are controlled by the government or the Kurds, has said that he would order U.S. forces to bomb them. Marco Rubio and Scott Walker, in speeches they delivered on Friday, both called for more aggressive actions against ISIS, but stopped well short of promising to deploy additional U.S. ground troops in Iran and Syria. Of the seventeen G.O.P. candidates, only two no-hopers—Lindsey Graham and George Pataki—have grasped that particular nettle. And, as you might have guessed, it didn’t help their poll ratings.

What explains the reluctance among politicians to consider confronting, head-on, a movement that has been intent on eradicating ideals that the United States and its allies hold dear? The Iraq War, of course. By destroying the Iraqi state and setting off reverberations across the region that, ultimately, led to a civil war in Syria, the 2003 invasion created the conditions in which a movement like ISIS could thrive. And, by turning public opinion in the United States and other Western countries against anything that even suggests a prolonged military involvement in the Middle East, the war effectively precluded the possibility of a large-scale multinational effort to smash the self-styled caliphate.

To be clear: I’m not calling for a full-scale ground war against ISIS: I’m not calling for anything. At this stage, like many other people, I suspect, I can hardly organize my thoughts about what’s happening in ISIS-held territory, beyond an acute feeling of dread and despondency. Hopefully, the current strategy will work. And, hopefully, the organization’s appeal to disaffected young Muslims around the world will wane. But do I have any real confidence that either of these things will happen? I do not.

Even at the time, the Iraq War seemed like a very bad idea. Twelve years on, it has developed into a wretched curse on the civilizations whose foundations were laid in places like Palmyra and Mosul.